Baseball Prospectus News

The New Pricing Plans: Now Available!

Note: This article was originally published on January 23, 2014. It has been updated to reflect the availability of the Super Premium subscription.

When Baseball Prospectus became a premium site 11 years ago, a one-year subscription cost $39.95. Since then, the US economy has inflated by an average of 2.4 percent per year, which means that if you'd stuck that $39.95 under your mattress in 2003, it would be worth only $30.62 in 2003 dollars today. If you spent the cash while you could on Nate Silver’s first-ever PECOTA projections instead of letting it depreciate, well done—you got more bang for your buck.

If you did hide it under the mattress, though, you’re in luck: you can still use the same amount to pay for a one-year subscription to Baseball Prospectus. Even though $39.95 isn’t worth what it once was—and even though we publish much more material than we used to—it’s still what we charge. That’s the kind of consistency you’ve come to expect only from Adam Dunn’s home run totals (except for that one year). And it’s not changing now.

But we are making two tweaks to our pricing plan, neither of which will cost you more money if you’re already paying for BP Premium.

The first is that we’re retiring the Fantasy-only subscription, which we’ve offered since 2005. From now on, purchasing a Premium subscription—again, for $39.95—will be the only way to access BP’s subscription-only content, and will continue to unlock everything on the site (including fantasy coverage).

We’re doing away with the fantasy sub because we’re devoting more resources than ever before to the fantasy side of the site, and we think we’ve made our fantasy content worth paying the Premium price. (Of course, if you’re already paying for Premium, this means that you’re getting more than you bargained for.)

Over the past year, we’ve built a top-notch fantasy staff with a wide range of experience and expertise. Bret Sayre, our fantasy manager, brings not only insight into long-term keeper and dynasty leagues, but two decades of rotisserie experience. Mike Gianella, our resident valuation guru, provides both pre- and post-season auction valuations, along with great insights into strategy. You probably know Paul Sporer best for his starting pitcher advice, but that’s only because you don’t know how much he looks like McLovin. Lovable internet personalities, jacks-of-all-trades, and Scoresheet experts round out the rest of the staff.

Earlier this month, Bret laid out our plan for fantasy coverage in the draft-prep period, and we’ve already put it into action, posting 28 fantasy-oriented articles over the past 10 publishing days. And that’s not counting the fantasy takes we’ve added for most major moves in our Transaction Analysis articles, the fantasy profiles for each player in Jason Parks’ Top 10 Prospects lists, or the three fantasy podcasts we’ve started.

We’ve been gratified to see that your feedback has been positive, and we’ll continue to monitor it as we improve the product further.

(We promise that wasn’t a plant.)

The other new development is that we’ll soon be offering we are now offering a “Super Premium” subscription option priced at $54.99. We know that many of you are Baseball Prospectus completists who not only subscribe to the site, but also attend our events and listen to our podcasts and acquire our books. We appreciate your support, especially when you volunteer to give us more money without getting anything in return.*

We don’t expect you to do that, though. If you pay for a Super Premium subscription, you’ll receive—in addition to the website’s premium content—the Futures Guide 2014e-book, a compilation of all the prospect and organizational rankings Jason Parks and the BP Prospect Staff have produced this winter. (Click here for a look at last year’s Futures Guide.) You’ll also receive PDFs of both volumes of Best of Baseball Prospectus, edited by yours truly. “That’s a $25 value!”, is what we would say if this were the end of an infomercial.

Finally, Super Premium subscribers will also gain access to The Bat Signal, our brand new fantasy answering service. When you need some advice on a trade offer, free agent pickup, keeper decision, or anything else related to fantasy baseball (no dating advice—you wouldn’t want it anyway), and you can’t wait until our next fantasy chat, send out the Bat Signal (in other words, fill out a form on our site to contact us, which sounds less exciting). We guarantee that you’ll get an answer to your question from a member of our fantasy staff within 12 hours. If (for some unforeseen reason) your question falls through the cracks, we’ll send Craig Goldstein over to your place of residence to personally deliver a homemade pie.*

*Offer not valid outside of Washington, D.C.

That’s it—not so scary. To recap: the Premium subscription remains the same price, but gives you more for the money; the fantasy subscription sails off into the sunset; and the Super Premium subscription gives you access to not only the site, but a selection of our other written content, as well as a new fantasy answering service.

To purchase a Premium or Super Premium subscription, head over to our aptly named Subscriptions page, where you’ll also find a summary of what it is you’re about to receive. If you’re looking for the kind of advanced statistical and scouting insight that makes major-league teams take notice (and sometimes take our employees), Baseball Prospectus has, both historically and recently, been your best bet. Expect to see sabermetric research from the likes of Russell A. Carleton and Harry Pavlidis and prospect analysis from Jason Parks and the rest of BP’s nationwide scouting network. You’ll also get a steady stream of Transaction Analysis from R.J. Anderson and others, mechanical breakdowns from Doug Thorburn, and the latest dispatches from writers like me, Sam Miller, and Zachary Levine, whom no team that knows what it’s doing would hire, but whose work we hope you’ll enjoy. You’ll also receive access to our full suite of statistical tools, including PECOTA projections, standard stat reports and custom sortables, Player Forecast Manager, and Team Tracker.

Feel free to email me, Joe Hamrahi, or BP customer service with questions or concerns about the pricing plan changes (or anything else, for that matter). We thank you for your continued patronage of BP, and for your participation in the Baseball Prospectus community.

**Update (February 16, 2014)** Super Premium subscriptions are now available, as are upgrades from Premium to Super Premium!

Regarding the "Super Premium Subscription," If my current subscription ends in July 2014, but I buy the Super Premium when it's first available (let's say April 1, 2014), when would the new subscription end?

I may have missed this somewhere, but can you give us a rough estimate of when PECOTA, etc. will be running including if possible any planned updates. It is time consuming to prepare for a draft, and then discover 2 days before the draft that an update to PECOTA has taken place and then all of the sudden, I've got to re-prepare. This is not a huge concern really, but the wife only gives me so much time to devote to this, so it does become quite precious around this time... Thank you and I continue to enjoy the work you guys do...

Don't have an exact date, but in the past we've tended to publish the spreadsheet right around the release date of the Annual (February 11th this year, though it often ships early). I'd expect this year's schedule to look similar.

On a related timing note, my scoresheet keeper list is due three days before the current release date for the prospectus. Any chance you guys could talk to scoresheet and coordinate? I'd vote that they move back, actually, as a few more free agents would be settled, but since the two go hand-in-hand so well it would be nice if you were better in sync.

Everything is already set for this year, of course. I was thinking more down the road but didn't make that clear. Compared to last year, the book is coming earlier, so I thought it might be possible one day. And some of the comments suggest it might arrive ahead of schedule anyway.

Trips into MD are feasible, but can depend on traffic and the like. If its within half an hour, I'm willing to do it. Hopefully it never comes to that, though. Let's just say they'll be considered on a situational basis.

As a long time subscriber and reader dating back to conversations on rec.sport.baseball, I can only dream of what it would have meant to me to have given you $250 for a lifetime subscription in 1996. Sigh. :-)

All jokes aside, I really, really, really, really would love to see you all come up with a multi-year subscription capability. I think a lot of us who have been with you since the beginning would love that.

Here I was all ready to complain about this being a thinly-veiled excuse to charge more for the same content (by requiring the super premium subscription to access certain content that is currently available to those with a regular premium subscription). But that's clearly not what's going on here, as it seems you're just seeking to expand sales for the annual/handbook by indirectly offering a discount on that content to premium subscribers. Thanks guys.

So where exactly does one locate "the Bat Signal". I am eager to hear about some prospects and in a few cases players, and my year-round league isn't slowing down just because the MLB has. I would love to hear back on potentials for the upcoming year, and I know you guys are the best predictors for that.